Extended Trailer
SET 1: Soul Shakedown Party > Divided Sky, Wilson > My Soul, Guyute, Timber (Jerry the Mule) > Billy Breathes, Llama, Bathtub Gin > Golgi Apparatus
SET 2: The Squirming Coil -> Down with Disease -> Carini -> Taste -> Down with Disease > Suzy Greenberg > Prince Caspian
ENCORE: Sleeping Monkey > Rocky Top
Phish years generally take a while to reveal themselves. Due to the nature of this project, I know the climax of each 12-month chapter going in, the marks they will eventually hit that define each particular calendar year in the consensus Phish histories. But usually the starting point is shrouded in fog, a long way off from the conclusion I know they’ll eventually reach. Watching those first wobbly steps is equal parts fascinating and frustrating. Phish years don’t always come in like lambs and exit lions, but by the end they rarely are facing the same direction as when they started.
1993 started with a bunch of new songs and a new piano, a band tightening up before it started loosening its screws in the summer. 1994 left the gates with a slick, practiced band pushing Hoist and ended up playing nightmarishly un-radio-friendly marathons. 1995 tried to ride that avant-garde even further but ended up falling in love with the more direct stomp of classic rock. And 1996 tried to export their refined sound to a new continent before getting frustrated with that same old approach in their homeland. There are sometimes early-year hints of what lies ahead — Roxy ‘93 and Bomb Factory ‘94 the notable examples — but usually it’s a methodical process, a mosaic of fleeting ideas gradually building up to a clear creative vision.
Maybe it was the reduced time off, but 1997 isn’t playing by those rules. Here we are, four shows into the year, and we get a night in Amsterdam that does a pretty damn good job of summarizing the year to come, a solid rough draft ready for 10 more months of revision. The 45 minutes of Disease into Carini into Taste back into Disease provide an accurate overture for the sound of 1997, and maybe even a little bit of 1998 and 1999 too. Even more than the 3/1/97 source material of Slip Stitch and Pass, which the band chose to quick-release as its mission statement, 2/17/97 establishes the parameters for Phish’s transformation.
It’s funny that this bold declaration happens in the same city as last year’s hilarious pothead debacle; clearly the band learned to moderate its intake of the local specialties on this return visit. Soul Shakedown Party may have been a knowing joke about that bloodshot night, but the rest of the first set is a sobriety test, full of complicated and fast songs that last year’s band would’ve completely spaced. It ends with moments of Type I brilliance: a heavens-touching Trey solo in Billy Breathes and a full-band parley in Bathtub Gin that never fully leaves the main theme behind for more than a few bars.
But it’s the second half that sets the stage for the year. After a Coil opener (another rule broken), Disease takes over most of the next hour, minus a couple diversions. This is Disease, and Phish arena rock writ large, at its very best, walking the tightrope between decisive and unhurried. It’s broad-strokes Rock God stuff on the surface and subtle jazz interplay underneath. You can hear Trey figuring out one of the magic tricks of 1997, that he can both submerge himself into the band like he’s long desired while also playing assertively. It just requires a fulcrum balance between overplaying and underplaying that only a true master can find.
Disease, despite its brisk pace, is in no hurry to go anywhere, and it deconstructs itself until it’s something akin to funk — not cowfunk, mind you, not yet, but whiffs of that sound’s clockwork precision. It’s interrupted by the auspicious debut of Carini, scrawled on a thousand Maxell tapes as “Lucy Had a Lumpy Head” and a cousin to the observational oddness of Walfredo and Rock A William. But Carini has proven to have much longer legs, thanks to a) the band playing on their regular instruments and b) Dat Riff.
A hard-rock tune about a drum tech and a misshapen noggin also proved to be quite the improv launchpad, as this first version demonstrates. Upon finishing the almost-incantational lyrics, Trey immediately finds a rocket-powered riff that the band pushes to December 95 extremes, a sprint race between Trey and Fish with Page and Mike white-knuckling behind. Then, the key breakthrough: the band pushes past that sound barrier, exploring the fertile ground beyond in a way that they never quite managed 16 months earlier.
What’s there builds immediately upon the hints planted in the previous night’s Crosseyed. Trey finds a loop that sounds like a screaming rain of Deceptacon screams, and lets it roll uninterrupted for four breathtaking minutes. Instead of using it as cover to pick up his drumsticks, he finds a way to play along and beneath. The whole band swerves in and out of phase with the loop, eventually turning to stop-starts and even extended silence while it swirls on with deranged menace. It’s evil, but it’s also…danceable, a demonic disco and likely a terrible time for anyone who followed 1996 Phish’s example this time around.
This is a totally new Phish sound, and yet they push even further, floating into an ambient section that’s already predicting 98 and 99 before 97 has barely left the blocks. As though to soothe those over-indulgers, it builds back with a lilting, emotional closing section that flirts with The Who’s Sparks, an Underture to the overture. It smoothly finds its way to Taste and then a Disease Reprise with barely any friction, the improvisational currents scooping up songs and pieces of songs with ease.
The segment is a Rosetta Stone for almost everything to come in the following year. And yet, this show feels somewhat underappreciated, despite circulating widely and quickly on tape and eventually getting official release on the Amsterdam box. Perhaps that’s because, for all its accomplishments, it’s probably the worst show on that box, because they cockily returned to the exact same venue four months later and played even better. It’s not just a sneak peek of where Phish will eventually end up, it’s a promise.